1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to data replication and, more particularly, to replication of one or more volumes in a storage system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various companies implement disaster recovery plans and/or systems to protect against a complete loss of a storage system. Some disaster recover plans and/or systems include an ability to eliminate a possibility of having large amounts of data loss within a storage system. For years, various companies have made regular data backups at the primary storage system (i.e., primary data center) by producing tape-backups on a regular basis for shipment to an offsite or secondary storage system (i.e., secondary data center). A tape-based backup solution can be utilized for some applications, while other applications, e.g., email, database, etc., need a faster system and/or method than shipping tape-based backups to a secondary data center.
Some faster systems include replicating data from the primary storage system to the secondary storage system across a network. In general, replicating data from the primary storage system to the secondary storage system across the network can be automated and may depend on a set of rules. This may reduce opportunities for human error and/or minimize a need for administrator intervention and/or interaction.
Typically, in more flexible storage systems, one or more storage virtualizations such as volumes can be used. In general, a volume may not depend on specific hardware storage devices, e.g., hard drives, arrays of hard drives, storage area networks, etc. available in a storage system, and a volume may include storage on a portion of storage space of one or more storage devices available in a storage system.
When data replication is performed from a primary storage system to a secondary storage system, the primary storage system may include a different set of storage devices than the secondary storage system. This may increase a level of complexity and/or challenges when replicating a volume included in the primary storage system to a volume of the secondary storage system. In particular, a difficult task in configuring servers for volume replication is the tedious and complex task of creating volumes of identical size and name (yet possibly on diverse or varying hardware) on one or more secondary servers.
Therefore, there exists a need to automate and/or provide a method and system to reduce the complexities and/or challenges associated with replicating one or more volumes from a primary storage system to a secondary storage system.